November 16, 2005

Campbell's Mistake on Child Deaths

That's probably as close as the Premier is capable of getting when it comes to admitting that he made a mistake - "The problem is going to be fixed …" His government terminated the Children's Commission and the Child and Youth Advocate. His government cut the budget for the Ministry of Children and Families. His government cut the budget for the Coroner and failed to provide it with the adequate resources to conduct comprehensive reviews of the deaths of children. Campbell's weak defence is that the Coroner under-spent his budget in recent years; he neglected to mention that going over budget is a capital offence under his regime. Like all other bureaucrats, the Coroner had no choice but to manage so as to come in under budget, even if that meant abandoning files. The Chief Coroner sits on the committee chaired by Ted Hughes; he should at least tell Hughes what cuts he had to make to live within his reduced budget over the past five years.

Solicitor General John Les, the minister responsible for the coroner's service, repeatedly answered questions by saying: "I want to make it very clear to all members of the House that today I am the minister responsible for resolving these issues and ensuring that we have a child-death review process in the province of British Columbia that meets all of the high standards that we have set as a government for these processes." It didn't take Opposition House Leader, Mike Farnworth, long to say: "Today and over the last few weeks we've heard that there was no transition plan. We've learned how the government, the Premier, made cuts that impacted on the ministry. The elimination of the children's commissioner - more than 80 missing files. In fact, they don't even know how many missing files there are. The minister talks about high standards. My question to the minister is: does he believe that those are high standards?" Les admitted that the closure of files on deaths of children before the investigations were complete is "unacceptable". He said nothing to explain how that happened in the Era of the Core Review and massive cutbacks.

Vital Statistics, a branch in the Ministry of Health, reports on the number of deaths in BC broken down by age. In 2004 there were 168 deaths of infants under age 1, 24 deaths age 1-4, 25 age 5-9, 30 age 10-14, and 104 age 15-19, for a total of 351 deaths. It is not unusual for three or four hundred "infants" (those under age 19 according to BC's Infants Act) to die in any year. With numbers like that it is easy for several deaths that could have been prevented to slip through the cracks and not be detected. It is even easier when government cutbacks result in less attention being paid to child deaths. That is why Gordon Campbell was right when in 1996 he said: "When a child dies, investigate. When a child dies, pay attention." What has changed since he became Premier?